[dot_treo]

Looks like we discovered it at essentially the same time, and in essentially the same way. If the pth file didn't trigger a fork-bomb like behavior, this might have stayed undiscoverd for quite a bit longer.

Good thinking on asking Claude to walk you through on who to contact. I had no idea how to contact anyone related to PyPI, so I started by shooting an email to the maintainers and posting it on Hacker News.

While I'm not part of the security community, I think everyone who finds something like this, should be able to report it. There is no point in gatekeeping the reporting of serious security vulnerabilities.

[notatallshaw]

> I had no idea how to contact anyone related to PyPI

https://pypi.org/security/:

> If you've identified a security issue with a project hosted on PyPI Login to your PyPI account, then visit the project's page on PyPI. At the bottom of the sidebar, click Report project as malware.

[0cf8612b2e1e]

The existing account to report is an unfortunate obstacle. Presumably not a huge deal if you were auditing code for vulnerabilities, but still an annoyance.

[notatallshaw]

The threat actor was sophisticated enough to spam GitHub issues with dozens of different accounts. I imagine they could completely overwhelm PyPI with unauthenticated reports.

[Fibonar]

The best part was that I didn't even mean to ask Claude who to contact! I was still in disbelief that I was one of the first people affected, so I asked for existing reports on the assumption that if it was real I definitely wasn't the first.

The fork-bomb part still seems really weird to me. A pretty sophisticated payload, caught by missing a single `-S` flag in the subprocess call.